Dean and Me

by Jerry Lewis

  I wasn’t trying to get even. At the time, I thought I was just getting on with my life. The Delicate Delinquent, with Darren McGavin playing the cop role that Dean had refused, had wrapped in October, and I thought it was terrific. NBC and I were firming up an agreement for my first solo TV special in January. And on the strength of my surprise appearance at the Frontier, I suddenly had a lot of club dates lined up.

  I won’t kid you—the breakup was still much on my mind. I missed Dean like hell. But action is a great pain reliever: When you’ve got a lot going on, there’s only so much time you can devote to introspection. The public, however, still didn’t want to let go. And so when Look magazine came and interviewed me in January, I tried to be as thoughtful and honest as possible: about myself, about Dean, and about the two of us.

  “As early as 1949, things began to be different,” I said in the piece. “Dean divorced Betty and married his second wife, Jeanne, and suddenly our families weren’t friendly anymore. As time went on, I grew to believe that Dean wasn’t the strong, self-reliant character I thought he was, but, if anything, felt even more insecure than I. We both discovered that we were completely different in temperament and in our outlook. I don’t blame Dean ... it probably developed out of his tough childhood—but he was never as warm and outgoing as I hoped he’d be.”

  That was definitely the hurt talking. I didn’t feel I was being unfair, but Dean hit the roof. Apparently, my mentioning Jeannie had set him off. “Jerry was jealous of Jeanne,” he told a reporter. And: “I respect other wives. I could talk about Patti and Jerry knows it, but I wouldn’t.”

  If my hurt could talk, so could Dean’s. At the end of January, a new NBC TV show featured live coverage of a party at the Beverly Hilton. Dean was there, he’d had a couple of drinks, and the enterprising interviewer, seeing an opportunity to further stir things up between us, ambushed him. Dean finally vented some of his own feelings, saying some not very complimentary things about me and my artistic aspirations, and the press—having set him up for the fall—hit him hard for it afterward.

  And then Ten Thousand Bedrooms came out.

  The critics really killed Dean this time, and none more enthusiastically than his old nemesis at the New York Times, Bosley Crowther. “More than a couple of vacancies are clearly apparent in this musical film,” he wrote. “One is the emptiness alongside of Dean Martin, who plays the lead without his old partner, Jerry Lewis, and that’s some emptiness indeed. Mr. Martin is a personable actor with a nice enough singing voice, but he’s just another nice-looking crooner without his comical pal. Together the two made a mutually complementary team. Apart, Mr. Martin is a fellow with little humor and a modicum of charm.”

  On one hand, this was just one more nasty critic giving Dean the same crap the critics always had given him, but this time Crowther was trying to finish Dean off. And unfortunately, he was right about the movie itself, which simply wasn’t very good.

  So 1957, the year Dean turned forty, was a tough one for him. They loved him at the Copa Room at the Sands, where he’d just signed a five-year contract. He would always have a home in Vegas. But that was only a few weeks out of the year. He had to let the rest of the country know who Dean Martin really was.

  Still, I want to tell you something about who Dean really was. One night while he was on stage at a club in Pittsburgh, a rowdy fan yelled out something derogatory about me and Dean stopped the show. “Sir,” he said, “I want you to know that even though we’ve broken up, I have the greatest respect for Jerry.”

  It put that audience in the palm of his hand. Almost fifty years later, it puts me in the palm of his hand, too. There he was, getting slammed by the critics—and still taking the high road.

  That July I played ten nights, as a single, at the 500 Club. Skinny D’Amato’s financial woes had worsened, and I wanted to do what I could for him. (Frank and Sammy, too, would both step in and help him out that summer.) But there I was again: July in Atlantic City—except that this time I was alone. It was a strange feeling. And strangest of all was how small and seedy Skinny’s club looked to me now that I’d had a taste of the best. It seemed frozen in the past. But I kept my head in the right place, played my ten nights, and moved on.

  I was on a kind of furious tear, a single-minded quest to become the King of Show Business, and over the next decade, to the degree that I succeeded, it was at great cost to myself and those close to me.

  Then, at the end of 1957, Dean’s solo career began to turn around. He would succeed beyond his wildest dreams.

  Ed Simmons, who with Norman Lear had cowritten The Colgate Comedy Hour for us, had always been a big believer in Dean’s comic skills. Now that Simmons and Lear had broken up themselves, Ed was looking for a new gig. So he went to Dean and offered to write some material for his nightclub act.

  Dean’s first reaction was “I’m just gonna sing.” But Ed told him, bluntly, that everyone already knew him as a singer, and it wasn’t enough— that image, by itself, fixed him in the past. Just another nice-looking crooner.... To really make his career take off, Ed insisted, Dean needed to continue being funny on stage.

  Then Dean had a stroke of genius. Everyone knew he was going through a tough time—why not have a little fun with it? In our act, he’d often used a glass of apple juice as a prop, pretending it was Scotch. He’d also taught me the trick of keeping anyone who annoyed you at bay by making believe you’ve had a few. Suddenly, he put two and two together and came up with the shtick that would work for him till the end of his life: He would play a drunk on stage. “Write me some stuff like that,” he told Simmons.

  Simmons wrote it, Dean lent it his brilliance, and it was a smash hit. Dean went from being someone people liked to see at the Sands to being someone they had to see, everywhere. His nightclub bookings took off.

  But then something even more important happened. In the after-math of the breakup, Lew Wasserman and Herman Citron at MCA had decided to put all their efforts into making sure that, despite the word on the street, Dean wouldn’t fail. Ten Thousand Bedrooms had largely been their doing, and they felt terrible about it. Now Citron had an idea about how to make Dean a serious movie star.

  A couple of years earlier, Frank Sinatra’s career had been in the dumper, too—and then he played Private Maggio in From Here to Eternity and won an Oscar. Now, in the summer of ’57, a new World War II movie, The Young Lions, starring Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift, was about to start shooting in Europe. There was a third major role in it—a devil-may-care former draft-dodger—that Citron felt was tailor-made for Dean.

  There was only one problem: Tony Randall had already been signed to play the part.

  Citron pled his case to the producer, and the producer brought the idea to Clift—who, as the box-office megastar of the moment, had creative control over the project. All Montgomery Clift knew about Dean was that he had been the straight man of Martin and Lewis. “Good God, no!” he reportedly said.

  Legend has it that Clift then went to see the latest Tony Randall movie, a light comedy, and decided that Tony had a brilliant future—in light comedy. The Young Lions was a very serious picture. Clift decided to give Dean a shot.

  The role would pay less than Dean was earning for a week at the Sands. What’s more, he was petrified at the thought of acting next to the great Brando and Clift. In the meantime, there had already been tension between the two hypersensitive Method actors. But then magic happened: When Dean flew to the film’s location in France, his sense of humor and easygoing personality charmed his temperamental costars. Marlon and Monty recognized what a natural Dean was as an actor and fell all over themselves trying to charm him right back. The end result was that the three of them wound up getting along—well, like a charm. The tension between Clift and Brando evaporated, both did some of their best work, and Dean—helped by Clift’s coaching—found depths in his acting that he’d never imagined.

  The Young Lions was a critical smash when it premiered in the sprin
g of 1958, but most notable was Dean’s emergence as a brand-new acting talent. “It’s inevitable,” Variety said of Dean, “that his performance...will be likened with what From Here to Eternity did for Sinatra.”

  Take that, Bosley Crowther!

  The Young Lions went on to become one of the biggest hits of the 1950s, and Dean’s success in it gave him a whole new public image—as an actor to be reckoned with and a multitalented superstar.

  He had also never stopped recording, though without a major hit. Maybe he just needed to get out of 1957. In January 1958, Dean recorded a new song called “Return to Me.” In early April, the same week that The Young Lions opened, the song hit the Billboard charts, where it would remain for five months, rising as high as No. 4. In July, he would record another hit, “Volare.”

  When Dean opened at the Beachcomber in Miami that spring, Billboard wrote, “If there’s any doubt that Dean Martin can make it as a single, cast the doubt aside.”

  The word on the street had shifted a hundred and eighty degrees: Dean Martin had a big, big future. And a big present. His first NBC special aired in late 1957, and the next year he was all over the small screen. Along with all his other successes, he was at the beginning of a brilliant TV career, one that would last for over a quarter of a century.

  We had both made it—but only after causing each other a world of hurt.

  Dean’s association with Frank Sinatra, the partnership that would lead to the formation of the Rat Pack, began toward the end of 1958, when Frank called Dean and asked him to costar with him and Shirley MacLaine in a new movie called Some Came Running.

  Frank and I had been friendly for years. We had great esteem for each other, but at the same time we never let it get too formal. I called him “Wop”; he called me “Jew.” (When Frank won the Oscar for From Here to Eternity in 1954, I wrestled him to the ground, in full view of the photographers outside the theater, and kissed him smack on the lips.)

  With Dean and Frank, of course, it was very different. They admired each other enormously, but Dean had always kept him at the same slight distance he kept everybody. When Dean and I broke up, though, I think Frank decided that Dean needed some extra attention, and he actively sought Dean out.

  I wasn’t in on the phone conversation, but I can imagine roughly how it went. “Hey, drunkard,” Frank would have said. (That was, and would remain, his nickname for Dean.) “How’s your bird?”

  “Hey, pally. What’s up?”

  “How’d you like to do a picture with Shirley and me?”

  “Sure—why not?”

  And that’s probably how Dean got to costar with Frank Sinatra and Shirley MacLaine in Some Came Running, the critical and box-office success about postwar, small-town America, based on the James Jones novel. Dean played Bama Dillert, a dying professional gambler—and a drunk. The role was tailor-made for him, but I noticed an interesting thing: Dean’s Southern accent. He first had exaggerated his drawl for our act—it was partly an affectation, but it worked well with his stage role. In Some Came Running , though, he sounded as if he really did come from Alabama. It was perfect for him and for the movie.

  Early the next year, along with John Wayne, Dean started shooting Rio Bravo, a Western directed by the great Howard Hawks. A Western, starring Wayne and Martin, and directed by Hawks. As I said before, Dean was now in movie heaven. As a drunken coward named Dude, he did his strongest acting ever—and got pretty damn good reviews, too.

  But something else happened in early ’59 that kicked Dean’s personal and professional life into a whole new gear. Back in the mid-fifties, Frank had spent a lot of time hanging around with Humphrey Bogart, his wife Lauren Bacall, and a group of the couple’s drinking buddies informally known as the Holmby Hills Rat Pack. (Dean and I had both been friends with Bogie and Betty Bacall, too, but I was never a drinker and Dean was never a joiner.) Besides Bogie, Betty, and Frank, the group included Judy Garland and Sid Luft, David Niven, Jimmy Van Heusen, and several others.

  Frank idolized Bogie, and he was crushed when Bogart died of lung cancer in 1957. But Frank still loved the idea of the Rat Pack: He liked to drink, and he liked to hold court. Not long after Bogie’s death, Frank started his own group: It included Van Heusen (who wrote some of Frank’s greatest hits, like “Come Fly With Me” and “Love and Marriage”), Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford, Joey Bishop, and Shirley MacLaine. At first they called themselves the Clan, but that sounded a little too much like that other clan, the one that begins with a K, so they finally settled, as a tribute to Bogie, on the Rat Pack.

  At first they all just drank and played cards. Sometimes they went out and raised a little hell. But Frank was having so much fun—these were his bachelor years—that he wanted to try and bring some of it to the stage. And meanwhile, he was courting Dean.

  Dean hadn’t changed. He still wasn’t about to join any groups, and he still liked to turn in early at night. But he admired Frank, and after doing Some Came Running, Dean knew they worked well together. In early January, Frank conducted the orchestra for Dean’s new album, Sleep Warm, and at the end of the month, the two of them performed together for the first time at the Sands.

  A remarkable thing happened when Dean and Frank got on stage together. Among friends, Frank was a funny guy, a great talker and story-teller, but in the past, he’d never been able to convey his humor to his audiences. For most of his professional life, he had done no more than announce the title and the writer of his next song. Eventually, he might add, “Rodgers and Hart—two nice men that I met, and they would love the way you people reacted to their song.”

  Frank admired many things about Dean, but one of the biggest was Dean’s ability to ad lib on stage. That drawl, that perfect timing—it struck Frank with the same kind of awe that Dean felt for Frank’s phrasing with a song. Performing together felt like a perfect career move. And what happened the instant Dean and Frank stepped onto the stage at the Sands was that they did a version of Martin and Lewis, with Dean assuming my old role—the cutup, the wise guy (less physical, of course)—and Frank playing the straight man.

  It worked beautifully. It let Frank be funny on stage, and it finally demonstrated to the world what a brilliant comic Dean was. He could do absolutely anything.

  Dean still wasn’t about to go out drinking and hell-raising with Frank and the others. But the act paved the way for him to get on stage with Frank, Sammy, Peter, and Joey. It wouldn’t take long before the Rat Pack was complete.

  If I was making a serious stab at being the King of Show Business, Dean was giving me a serious run for my money. I sure didn’t have to feel guilty anymore. But I also sure missed him: We hadn’t spoken in over two years, and if I’d known then that it would be eighteen years more, I don’t think I would have survived.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  LIFE MOVES ALONG BY ITS OWN MYSTERIOUS SETS OF RULES. By the mid-1960s, Dean and I were in totally separate orbits, in our work and our private lives. For seven years, Patti, our six sons, and I had been living in Louis B. Mayer’s old house on St. Cloud Road in Bel Air. Dean, Jeannie, and their large brood lived in a big place on Mountain Drive in Beverly Hills, just a mile or two away. It might as well have been a hundred miles—our paths never crossed.

  I’m sure many young fans were only vaguely aware that we’d once been a team. Dean had continued recording, building strength on strength: In 1964, the year the Beatles invaded America, he knocked them off the top of the charts with his hit “Everybody Loves Somebody.” He’d also continued making movies—fun ones like Ocean’s Eleven and Robin and the 7 Hoods, and, of course, Westerns, like The Sons of Katie Elder. Whether the pictures sank or swam, there was no denying he was a major international star. And after years of doing successful TV specials for NBC, in 1965 he signed a multimillion-dollar deal with the network to star in his own weekly series. In various incarnations, as The Dean Martin Show, The Dean Martin Comedy Hour, and Dean Martin Celebrity Roasts, it would become one of the most successf
ul shows of all time, running until 1984.

  Meanwhile, I was trying to concentrate on filmmaking. I made sixteen movies in the 1960s, and either produced, directed, or wrote (or did some combination of the three) on ten of them. Features like The Bellboy, The Ladies’ Man, and The Nutty Professor were hits.

  Television was more up and down. After a successful stint guesthosting on the Tonight Show, I tried a couple of series, a variety show, and a talk/variety show that didn’t quite jell. And in 1965, the same year Dean’s TV career soared to a new level, I suffered an on-air disaster.

  I was doing a guest spot on The Andy Williams Show, with a dance number like a thousand dance numbers I’d done before. Andy Williams, his chorus girls, and me, all singing and high-stepping around the stage—except that all of a sudden I hit a little wet spot and went down like a ton of bricks.

  Everyone around me figured I was just doing another one of my pratfalls—after all, I’d been throwing myself around on stage for a good twenty-five years. The director kept the tape rolling and I finished the number.

  Then I went straight to the hospital.

  I had not only fractured my skull, I’d also taken a chip out of my spinal column, and the results were disastrous: nausea, dizziness, double vision, and horrendous pain. The doctors put my neck in a metal brace and prescribed codeine and Empirin.

  The pain got worse.

  Over the next year, the doctors eventually told me, a fibrous knot built up around my spinal injury. The pain became constant and agonizing. The medicine they gave me didn’t touch it. Heat and massage didn’t help.

  Then one of my doctors prescribed Percodan.

  To my absolute astonishment, one pill made me feel like a human being again. The pain that had affected every waking moment, every interaction, suddenly receded, restoring my smile and leaving me free to think about all the things people normally think about. The pain was still there, of course, but in the background, always reminding me that it might come back full-force whenever it chose.